Adulting as tragedy.

Recently, I read Madeleine Davies' article "You're Not 'Adulting,' You're Acting Your Fucking Age" over at Jezebel. Since I'd recently adopted the term in my own vocabulary, I thought it interesting to see somebody articulate some of my own unseated concerns about it.

​Davies writes,

We can all recognize that being an adult is hard. We can also recognize that there are legitimate challenges to modern adulthood that didn’t exist 50 years ago. Even putting aside major current issues like stagnant wages and the inflated housing market, there are certain things that we grown ups have to do (clean, pay bills, sit in meetings) that are always going to suck and that we’re always going to complain about.
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That’s okay! I love complaining! Complaining is one of the best parts of being an adult. But when it comes down to getting shit done, it’s time to put aside your need to feel special and praised and simply do your adult diligence without putting a cute word on it. Pay your bills, clean your rented apartment (because you’re too poor to own, obviously), and show up to work on time. Or don’t, and face the consequences.

OK. I can handle that. Good stuff. "Being an adult is hard," and that is normative. No need to congratulate yourself with a hashtag-friendly catchphrase.

But there's another layer to this that's a little more insidious.

Remember, when you were younger, reading those novels where parents and adults were unbelievable messes? Like, both the adults in The Poisonwood Bible, if I remember correctly, were severely unbalanced. I remember reading that book at 24 or so and thinking, "Is this person even real?" It seemed so intense that it was practically campy.

And what about all the depraved cowboys in The Englishman's Boy or Unforgiven? For a while, I could barely believe that they weren't just caricatures. They seemed just too out of step with ethics and morality. 

But then I became a public school teacher and—30 of them a class, four times a day—I met the wide spread of the human condition, sprawled all over the political compass.

And then I became older myself and saw more and more despondent, impulsive people all around me, and I realized they weren't over-acting. These were just adults being adults.

And I met the people whose conditions fill up the DSM.

And I found that I have my place in there too.

This is the real tragedy of adulting: seeing the mess adults make, how we ever-so-easily mess each other's lives, how those seemingly exaggerated characters from novels… live next door to you. That's where the hashtag belongs—as a marker of our unhinged, extended, adult reality. 

Long live adulting.